VOA常速英语:Key Town in Civil Rights Movement Hosts VP Debate(翻译)

As Farmville prepares for the debate,chief prosecutor Megan Clark gets ready for a day in court.“Do you want to talk about another case?”She is the first African-American elected to the job, but she never campaigned on her race, she says.

“Some people would go into the dialogue with me of, ’Oh, are you trying to get the black vote?’I’m like, ’Nope, I’m trying to get the people’s vote.’”“"I’m not going to go down that path.”

“This Number Three is made right here,” Rev. J. Samuel Williams knows that path all too well.He was a student at Robert Russa Moton High School.The school is now a museum.In 1951, Williams and a group of Moton students went on strike to protest conditions at their segregated, blacks-only school.It had none of the amenities of the town’s white school.“They had a gymnasium, we did not; furnished room, we did not.”Their textbooks were hand-me-downs from the white school.”“A lot of pages were missing and a lot of racial derogatory expressions.They use the in word ”.

Their protest was included in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court.That ruling declared school segregation unconstitutional.Schools were to be integrated, quote, “with all deliberate speed”.

“That meant take your time.It meant not right now.”In fact, the county shut public schools rather than integrate.For five years, most blacks and poor whites went without an education.

“This is a picture of me, playing in the bam”.Theresa Clark was great school age when the schools closed.Her mother snuggled her into school in the next county.Clark had to memorize a false address or get kicked out.“At that moment, my mother taught me to lie, I had to for survival.”

She now chairs Longwood University Social Work Department.When she had children, she says their education was paramount.It paid off.Megan Clark is her daughter.Rev. Williams said a prayer at her swearing-in.“And it was when he was speaking that I got it because he is a very stoic man.He is a very strong man, and he had tears in his eyes.”

But she says the recent police shootings of unarmed black men have been a step backward.“It’s like you have a scab that’s healing, and it’s now festering again.”Even as the term of the first African-American President ends, Clark says,there is still healing to do in Farmville and across the country.

Steve Baragona, VOA News, Farmville, Virginia.